With the advent of digital imaging technology, it has become possible for consumers to create customized products such as photo greeting cards, framed prints and albums inexpensively. Even if the original image is available only as a traditional paper print, it is possible to use a photo kiosk to scan the image and use it creatively in a new print product.
There are a number of commercially available software products that provide custom printing services to be used for printing on a home printer. Photo kiosks provide similar services for printing at the kiosk itself. Typically, these products provide a very wide selection of possible colors and designs for use as background and/or around the border of the print. Most products also allow for the addition of text on or around the image, and there are numerous choices of fonts, sizes and colors available for this purpose. The user selects an image or a set of images to be used. Examples of custom printing software include Microsoft's Picture It, ArcSoft's PhotoPrinter, and others such as PrintSix, PhotoElf and ImageBuddy.
Albuming software products provide a variety of templates for page layout and themed decorations, in addition to backgrounds and borders. Some albuming softwares offer choices of music or audio to include with each album page of a digital album (soft copy), to produce a multimedia presentation for the viewer. Some examples of albuming softwares include DogByte's Creative Photo Album, flipalbum.com's FlipAlbum, Xequte's Diji album and also Microsoft's Picture It.
In a typical situation, the consumer needs to spend a lot of time at a task such as albuming or generating customized prints, most of the time being spent in searching for suitable image sets from the consumer's image collection and trying out the various options and their combinations till a visually pleasing combination is found. Since software products in this application area typically offer hundreds of options for each choice to be made (in some cases, thousands), it is increasingly difficult for a consumer to produce an effective presentation of their image(s) easily and quickly. The consumer can get tired of exploring all possible combinations and settle on one which does not meet all their criteria, causing dissatisfaction.
In U.S. Pat. No. 6,389,181 issued on May 14, 2002, Shaffer et al discuss a method for automatically producing a photocollage by employing image recognition techniques. However, their method of selecting layout and page design is based on the availability of a customer profile containing the customer's color preferences, layout preferences and design considerations. The image content is not used in this process. Face recognition is used for grouping images, assuming that sample faces and identification of all members of the customer's family are available in the customer profile. A scenario where a comprehensive customer profile such as this is available is hard to achieve in practice.
In the International Application WO 02/01537 A2 published on Jan. 3, 2002, Cohen-Solal et al use demographic information and the number of people, as in the present invention, for adapting the content of a display screen. Here, these characteristics are estimated from live video feed and mapped to audio-visual presentations that will be most relevant for viewing, given the current audience. The mapping is customized to cater to the interests of specific groups, for example, a primarily male audience may prefer sports highlights or a frequently moving audience may require short presentations. A similar automatic customization would be useful but is currently unavailable for the album generation process.
A need therefore exists to provide the consumer with fewer, but well-crafted, choices that would help them to achieve the given task (albuming, custom printing, etc.) quickly and satisfactorily. The suggested choices should be appropriate for the image content displayed, and provide a complete solution that takes into account all the interactions between individual elements, e.g., the color of background should work well with the border chosen. This process would not limit the consumers' choices, as the suggestions could provide the starting points for more explorations if the consumer so wishes.